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Somewhere near the end of his memoir, Andrew Lloyd Webber ponders the nature of autobiography. What’s the point, he asks, “if it isn’t truthful – at least from your own perspective?” It’s a curious thing for him to say, given that the king of the West End musical has just spent the past 500 pages of this brick of a book – which takes us from his birth in 1948 to the success of The Phantom of the Opera in 1986 – being rather coy about his emotions and the people who mattered to him.

There are hints of a difficult relationship with his collaborator, the lyricist Tim Rice; a whiff of capriciousness about Trevor Nunn, the director of Cats; and traces of vaulting ambition in Sarah Brightman, the...